A senior lecturer at the University of Cape Coast, Dr. Frank Ackah, has called for the creation of a dedicated Agricultural Service structure similar to the Ghana Education Service (GES) and Ghana Health Service (GHS), arguing that Ghana’s growing backlog of unemployed agricultural graduates reflects deeper institutional neglect of the sector.
Speaking to The High Street Journal, Dr. Ackah said the country’s agricultural system cannot achieve its food production and transformation goals while trained agricultural graduates remain unemployed for years, even as farmers across communities continue to face serious shortages in extension support.
According to him, Ghana’s agricultural colleges were specifically established to train personnel for the Ministry of Food and Agriculture and rural farming communities, yet the current system does not prioritise their structured absorption in the same way teachers and health workers are recruited and posted.
He argued that this institutional gap has contributed to a widening disconnect between agricultural training and actual deployment.
“Currently we have the extension officer to farmer ratio is about one thousand five hundred people which is not encouraging, not good,” Dr. Ackah said.
He noted that while Ghana maintains dedicated service structures for education and health, agriculture, despite its central role in food security, farmer productivity and rural development, lacks a comparable institutional framework for systematically recruiting, posting and retaining trained professionals.
Dr. Ackah said this has left some agricultural graduates unemployed for up to seven years, a situation he described as discouraging for both graduates and the colleges training them.
He also raised concerns about what he described as inconsistencies in recruitment and deployment, arguing that some individuals without agricultural training are sometimes placed in extension-related roles while qualified agricultural graduates remain at home.
For him, the consequences extend beyond graduate unemployment into broader national development risks.
Without enough trained agricultural officers in farming communities, he warned, farmers may lack adequate guidance on safe pesticide use, crop practices, and productivity strategies, potentially affecting food quality, public health and Ghana’s broader agricultural self-sufficiency agenda.
Dr. Ackah further argued that flagship government programmes aimed at boosting food production could struggle to achieve intended outcomes if trained agricultural personnel are not central to implementation.
He is therefore urging government to prioritise the establishment of an Agricultural Service structure that would create a clearer recruitment, deployment and career pathway for agricultural professionals, similar to existing systems in education and health.
In his view, such a reform would not only help absorb growing graduate backlogs but also strengthen extension delivery, improve support for farmers, and align agricultural human capital with Ghana’s wider food security ambitions.
